Yearly Archives: 2023

The Southern California Gundam Model Competition was this past weekend, Nov 11, 2023. If you were there, thanks for coming! I mean, I chatted with folks from New York, Boston, Washington DC, Pittsburg, Denver, etc. A good number of these folks flew/drove out here specifically to this show. One of the folks from Pittsburg came up and said hi to me and I completely didn’t recognize him – the last time I saw/talked to him was 2006 (a good 5 years before our first SCGMC – and SCGMC has been around for 12 years now – ugh, I suddenly feel old AF). So if you missed it this year, try to make it next year and here’s what you missed:

Panels we had:

The Vendors:

We don’t have a date/venue nailed down yet, but we’ll be working on that for the next few months. That said, we do have next year’s theme announced: “Seed” The theme usually ties into something Gundam related – for instance, next year will be the release of the Gundam SEED movie, and with that, there should be tons of Bandai merch on the subject. But for those that know us, things can take a very creative or dark turn as you guys are very good at the outside of the box thinking we look for; I mean, you guys ought to be after 12 years of SCGMC theme training. For those not familiar, the theme is an overarching “add-on” game of sorts that can be part of any of our 16 categories

We had 101 individual entrants this year with 316 competition kit entries. This doesn’t include all the display kits that folks also brought that were not entered into the contest. Not bad for a Gundam focused model contest. We got most of the pictures of the kits and apologize if we missed yours. There is quite a bit happening behind the scenes to get this running as smoothly as we possibly can. Right off the bat, below is the link to a PDF file with the winners and pictures.

2023 SCGMC Winner’s list

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This is a kit that is at least 12 or so years old. I think my friend picked this up while we were in HK (the conversion kit version). This is a recast of that conversion kit and actually recasted the MG Zaku II 2.0 parts needed for the kit. Well, almost all the parts. I found one missing part that I ended up having to recast myself from one of my built Zeeks.

So a nicely packaged resin kit, craptastic photocopied instructions. I needed some help from the MG Zaku’s 2.0 manual and the old MG Kampfer manual to help guide the build. I also did a quick paint spoon test for colors I thought would work on this project. Top of the spoon down, we’ve got Mr Color Orange Yellow, Finisher’s Light Gun Metal (the color I really wanted to use for this), and Mr Color German Grey. At least I have the main color scheme figured out – I can get to resin clean up.

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